Caching and Scheduling for Broadcast Disk Systems

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Abstract

Unicast connections lead to performance and scalability problems when a
large client population attemps to access the same data. Broadcast push
and broadcast disk technology address the problem by broadcasting data
items from a server to a large number of clients. Broadcast disk
performance depends mainly on caching strategies at the client site and on
how the broadcast is scheduled at the server site. An on-line broadcast
disk paging strategy makes caching decisions without knowing access
probabilities. In this paper, we subject on-line paging algorithms to
extensive empirical investigation. The Gray algorithm [KL98] always
outperformed other on-line strategies on both synthetic and Web traces.
Moreover, caching limited the skewness needed from a broadcast schedule,
and led to favor efficient caching algorithms over refined scheduling
strategies when the cache was not small. Prior to this paper, no work had
empirically investigated on-line paging algorithm and their relation with
server scheduling.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-71)